I don’t normally pimp my work on here, but I swear this is relevant: I have a piece in the upcoming comics anthology The Big Feminist But. Read my story, “My Horrible Heroines,” in the preview and feel the misandry wash over you!

I’m so sick of winter already I can hardly stand myself, and we’re barely a month in. We got snow about a week before Hallowe’en, and it stuck around. And kept coming. And it’s been hovering around minus 20 C. I’m sick of sweeping snow off my truck, and shoveling snow off my deck, and cold wind, and clouds. Bleh. I need to re-think my life and somehow make enough money to become a snowbird.

(Although, I find it kind of comical how cold -20 is on the way down, and how balmy and warm it is on the way up.)

For people with Reynauds, you might have heard of this, but here you go again:

Speaking of 50K word counts – is there a rough estimate of how long a book that would be? I’m thinking ordinary paperback rather than trade paperback, say. Probably far too vague a question given different fonts and so on, but does anyone have any ideas?

About 200 pages or a little less. Too short to really be publishable as an adult novel, which is why most people don’t finish when they hit the 50k mark. (Of course I write novellas, so mine are usually a lot shorter than that!)

To be honest, I didn’t write anything worth reading. I’ve stalled out and failed miserably at every past nano, so my goal this year was to just write fifty thousand words. A lot of it was talking about my lunch, and my frustrations with my job, and how many more words I had to go until I reached that day’s goal. The idea was to get in the habit of writing every day, and, um, not failing miserably again.

So, you know, mission accomplished. I think, just out of curiosity, I’m going to cut out the bits of actual story and see how much that amounted to. Sadly, not very much, I’ll bet.

My other goal was to get over my hesitation to write sex scenes (I feel all awkward and self-conscious writing them, but you know, I’m trying to write romance novels, and I like the kind with smut in them, so I kind of need to write them). I made a little progress there, but again, nothing that I’d want anybody else to read.

Unimaginative- Please don’t sell yourself short, at least you made the attempt, and you succeeded in making the word count. :) This year was my first time ever attempting NaNo; I was lucky that I had a story that I was able to keep going. It may not be my best work right now, but once I’m done with a few months’ worth of editing, it’ll be much better.

Sorry to be AWOL again today; sometimes I just hit my limit with misogynist creepoids and have to clear my brain with Hitchcock movies and Doomsday Preppers (which I may now be sick of) and by making mixtapes. There will be a new post tomorrow, though (well, later today), and you can take that to the bank!

(Don’t blame me if the people at the bank look at you funny, though.)

In the meantime, I’m glad Cloudiah has pointed you to a new troll to play with.

Yeah, I wear mitten-gloves outdoors (with koalas on because I am secretly five). I’m usually OK indoors – more so here because we don’t actually have a working freezer, as long as there’s some central heating. Although I lived one year in a Young Ones-style* house, where we couldn’t afford gas or electricity most of the time. In fact it was the year of the 4-month snow, and I was writing my dissertation wearing 4 pairs of socks, two pairs of leggings, jeans, pyjama bottoms, three t-shirts, two jumpers, a hoodie and a dressing gown, a wooly hat and a pair of gloves. It was also a very old and poorly-insulated house.

I had no idea that I had Reynauds at the time, but when I was at the boarding school of “suffering will toughen you up” in Scotland I used to sleep in a thick jumper, wooly socks, a hat, and gloves, because it was so fucking cold. And then one winter the dorm window was jammed open and they decided that we didn’t need heating till January, so we experimented with leaving milk and cream cheese out to see if it was actually cold enough for perishable foods not to spoil (it was).

Probably? It also gave me bronchitis that lasted for at least 6 months, though. I do think that still being required to play hockey and lacrosse in the rain and snow while I had bronchitis was a little unreasonable. Basically it was kind of like a military school, but with mandatory ballroom dancing lessons.

Still slaving away on my nano; 84000 right now. I want 100,000 by Friday. Make it so, number one!

…but I’m not sure anybody would actually want to read an angry screed that starts out as a kind of Charlie Stross ripoff sorta thing and then gets into an angry screed about religion and sexuality and punching zombies’ heads off. And then there’s a twist, and it turns out to be an even ANGRIER screed against religion. And so on.

I think I was working out some personal issues there. Cheaper than good therapy. And hopefully better written.

Hey, has anybody seen the #1reasonwhy hashtag on twitter and the articles that it’s generating? It’s women in the video game industry talking about why sexism in the video industry is a problem. Of course, it’s bringing a lot of clueless misogynists out of the woodwork, especially on noted man-cave Kotaku.

As somebody who works in a notably woman-friendly video game company, this is of serious interest to me.

Well, back in 2007 when I did my first one… I discovered that I work well under pressure.

(this has also had some effect on my work life)

So now I just live for November. I spend months pre-planning. Because I get more done in one month than I do all year because the whole WRITE WRITE WRITE RIGHT NOW motivation factor works better for me than anything else I’ve tried.

All the cool kids are doing it. Wait, are we the cool kids? Or are we those weird nerdy kids that the cool kids make fun of? And then we get total revenge because we mature into beautiful swans and they just get old and uncool.

Very true, howard. I now embrace every bit of my nerdiness. Whenever someone gives me shit for being a nerd, I point out that without nerds, the world would still be in the Stone Age. Who else would invent cool stuff but the nerds? :D

I’m slowly working my way towards the ending. I decided that some of the other parts were getting boring, and that I would fix them later during the editing process. I just want to see how my whole story plays out. Sorry you’re having troubles, katz. *inspiration vibes* :)

Oh, Kotaku. The site that wraps up misogyny, racism, and utter contempt for anyone outside the treehouse up into one obnoxious package, and then insists on trying to deliver it to all the other Gawker sites any time anyone mentions sex or games, despite repeated attempts by all the other sites to return said package as undeliverable.